Songs of the Winter Nights
by M.A.I Symphony
Summary: In your sleep, in your hair, you'll always know I'll be there. She picked up her bindle and floated away, into the cold winter night.


_Songs of the Winter Nights_

_For Emily_

**Winter Solstice**

"In your sleep, in your hair, you'll always know I'll be there." She picked up her bindle and floated away, into the cold winter night.

- -

She wore an ivory morning gown of chiffon and lace, holding an old, tattered pigeon in her silk-like hand. Her azure hair flicked through the soft zephyr, it's curls intertwined down past her bosom. She turned her face towards mine, and our eyes met. In more than a second, she was gone, again.

I shut my taupe eyes gruffly, and opened them again to find nothing through the sparkling skylights that lied above me, but a rainy sky. The droplets made a small thud. It thudded and thudded until I forced myself out of the cranky little cot. I always liked cots; Some people may say they're the most uncomfortable thing to sleep on, but for me, it feels like the only thing I could sleep on.

It was a couple of days before Christmas, Winter Solstice, if I remember correctly. The only thing I could do that day was sleigh, that is, if the _rain_ didn't wash away the icy roads too. It was really all anyone did this season; sleigh. Sleigh here, there, up, down; anywhere.

Anyway, before I could contemplate about it, or anything for that matter, my mother darted through the door. Her burgundy curled hair, bolstered behind her long neck in a crimson velvet ribbon, hung loosely behind her white halter top. There, between ruffles that lied above her bosom, revealing ample flesh for a woman her age, stood a plastic scarlet rose. Beneath this extravagant top, a broom skirt hung, filled with the color of a cardinal's feathers. For a moment I gazed at this woman, my _mother_, who bore no resemblance to me; but hey, I didn't come from nowhere.

After her entrance, she gave me a mother's glare - as I call it. "Fall, you know today is the day we start getting prepared for the Christmas dinner!" She chided. Every year she'd force me out of my cot to prepare for our Christmas dinner four days in advance; when Christmas came, we practically had to _warm_ the damn grub up.

I groaned, and quickly threw on some wrinkled shorts and wrapped a denim kerchief around my sweaty head. I looked like a modern peasant compared to her. I always did, though. She was always Mary Sunshine, with a mother's edge of course.

Sometimes, though, I never really understood her; it was like she was always covering something up. It's as if she _wanted_ to be that fifties mom, with a plastered smile and that cut-out body.

Anyway, I followed her down my personal staircase, past our wacky boarders who really belonged in a loony bin, down the main staircase, and into the kitchen. It was the rare time we were together; other than that, we seldom were in the same room. Just two souls in a big red boarding house. Crazy, huh?

After we were done playing mother and daughter for the day, it was evening; the longest evening, apparently. I decided to give Jam a buzz, and maybe take a whack at sledding or something.

While I was walking down the city's tattered sidewalk, I saw a familiar face. Well, it wasn't _exactly_ familiar; nostalgia you could call it. Anyway, I saw a woman with long streaks of hair, the color of a robin's egg. The locks fell over a long overcoat of magnolia. The woman was sitting in a rigid bench on the outside of one of the park's entrances. She was reading a book of some sort, guided by the light of the lamppost nearby. I saw her eyeing me, instead of reading.

The woman was not new to me; I'd seen her around the neighborhood all the time during this season. Magnolia, is what I called her. She always was wearing the same color, at least whenever I saw her. The strange thing, though, was that she was always around during this season and not any other. She only stayed during the first half, usually 'til late January. I started seeing her around a lot when I was about twelve. By now you'd think that I'd gone up to her and ask what her deal was, but there was something that told me to let her be.

I could spot her anywhere, too. Her famous hair was hard to miss; it wasn't just the color, but the length. It almost reached down to her hips, and seemed a bit long for a woman her age. Now, if you told someone about this, they'd think she was an eighty year-old hippie, homeless, with an ugly wig on. But not her. Sometimes she looked even_ more_ beautiful than a magnolia.

She always had the same face on too: something that looked like it was going to burst into tears, but from a quiet happiness. She looked like a sacred goddess, one that was not to be touched.

Anyway, once I finally found ol' Jam by our little meeting spot, he had one of the most morose faces I've ever seen on him. Jam was a guy that would go dance and sing in a forest with a hairbrush in his hand. "Hey Jammy, whatsamatter?"

"Fall, I finally did it. I finally told him," he said, looking down at his shoes.

"Told who what?" I wasn't exactly sure what to make of it, until it hit my slow-ass brain. "Oh, that you think 'Men are heavenly creatures with pulsating bodies made by the Greek gods?' Is that it?" I said verbatim from a lecture he gave me on, "Why I like guys."

"Well, you could put it that way, but it was more like, 'Jamil, why must you be Frank 'N Furter every time you and your weird friends perform that drag queen show?' And I just said, 'Dad, you don't have to be gay to be Frank 'N Furter!' And you know what the bigot said?" Jam usually exaggerated at things like this, but I could tell it came straight from the heart. "He said, 'Well you and your sissy ass could've fooled me.' So that's when I spilled the damn, ugly beans. After, he just, stared, at the floor or something'. Then he walked away." Jam finished his little novelette, with a tear in his eye.

"Aw, Jam," I said, raising a finger to wipe the tear that was about to germinate down his smooth cheek. "It's alright, you could crash at my house, and we could both look at the sky through the windows in my room. How about it?" He nodded at that, and I reached up and gave him a little peck on the cheek, and put an arm around his slim waist. He leaned his head to my shoulder, and we started to walk down the sidewalk.

As if the poor guy didn't have enough problems to deal with, but besides being insulted and critiqued on skin pigment, he was going to be made fun of who he kissed. You really should've met him though. He was one of the most dark-skinned people I've ever seen, and wasn't that guy tall! The funny thing was that he sung all the time. You'd have thought he was a track star or something.

We ended up going to Blue Note, a Jazz club in Greenwich Village. I was a sucker for Jazz, still am, and I always lugged Jam along with me.

When we arrived, the band there was playing something I was unfamiliar with. At the corner of my eye, I saw ol' Magnolia in the back row. She was staring intently at the band, letting the tunes flow through her. I really never saw Magnolia at Blue Note though, but I just assumed it was a coincidence we were there at the same time.

**A/N: Confusion is normal. Just read on and things'll make sense.**

**Happy Holidays.**

**To be continued.**

**Escalus.**


End file.
